These rocks have, perhaps, been more deeply soaked with blood than any other part of the entire Allied line on any continent.  Here died many thousands of the bravest and the best of the youth of Italy.  “Nella primavera si combatte e si muore, o soldato.”  How many great lovers, fathers, thinkers, poets, statesmen, that might have been, but never were, lie here!  These lands will ever be more thickly peopled with the cemeteries of the dead than with the villages of the living, lands desolate and barren, yet strange and beautiful.  Clear and clean is the beauty of those graves in the noonday brightness, delicate and tremulous in the early dawn and in the soft light of a fading day, and for us, who think of those dead with a proud and tender emotion, that beauty is, in some sort, a frail consolation.  The dust of strong men from the great mountains is buried here, and of men from the historic cities and the small unknown towns and the little white villages of Italy, and of peasants from the wide plains, and of brave men from the islands, and a handful of Frenchmen and Englishmen along with them, and very many of those tragic soldiers, drawn from many races, who died in the service of the Austro-Hungarian State, fighting against their own freedom.  I see again, as vividly as though it were yesterday, those high-hearted legions of Italy, sturdy men and fresh-faced boys, going forward with a frenzied courage, supported by an Artillery preparation which elsewhere would have been thought utterly insignificant, to assault positions which elsewhere would have been declared impregnable.

“The world,” said Lincoln at Gettysburg, “will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.  It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced; that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”  So may it be!  They died for the dream of a greater, a free and a secure Italy, and, the more reflective of them, for a better, more coherent world and no more war.  A part of their dream is already come true, but part is a dream still, a debt to them that only we can pay.  It will need to be a far better world, with a progress sustained and ever growing through centuries to come, if this tremendous sum of wasted youth, of broken hearts, of embittered souls, of moral degradation, of wounds that cannot be healed until all this ill-fated generation has passed away, if this great sum of past and present evil is to be cancelled by future good in the cold balance of historic reality.  Of the dead we may say, their task is over, their warfare is accomplished.  But not of the living.  The future is theirs, to make or mar.